Thoughts on encouraging more vocational people into teachingFewer people are considering teaching than ever, and persuading skilled craftspeople out in industry and into the classroom is stifling the country’s productivity. In this article I question if language and expectations might play a part in the reasons why.The one thing many notice when transitioning from a physical work environment into an academic one is just how ‘academic’ things can actually be, both as part of the teaching expectation and the qualification content. The current path for a vocational expert into education is often through the unqualified teacher route; starting work in a college and completing your teaching qualification on the job so to speak, in contrast with, for example, a secondary teacher who has often completed a degree and trained directly as a teacher.For many from vocational backgrounds, there is a stark contradiction. Stepping off the tools as an electrician on a Friday afternoon and starting as a teacher on a Monday morning is a daunting prospect, and perhaps one of the reasons that there is such a shortage of people willing to retrain as teachers (not to mention pay differentials). The academic pathway is rarely chosen by those in trades and professions because they did not consider themselves academic in the first instance, yet when they come into education, they are dropped into an academic and often bureaucratic and managerialist world. It is daunting. One aspect of this is societal.The presumption that someone from a vocational background isn’t academic in nature, even though they have proved themselves successful in college since they left school, is something conferred onto people and worse still, believed. Despite all of this, it is often not the case. Vocational teachers very often surprise themselves with how well they cope with the academic element of the teacher training qualification and how well they pick up the non ‘workshop/lab/salon/kitchen’ elements of the teaching role.BARRIERS TO TEACHINGThis article isn’t intended to do a deep analysis of why we are having such a difficult time recruiting but seeks to highlight an element that irks me. One of the reasons that some enter education is for stability, yet it is anything but. For example, it feels that every time we see some form of qualification reform, we enter back into the academic/vocational debate. See the T Level, the 14-19 Diploma and the GNVQ as examples of the argument.But one thing I think we’re really missing is not necessarily the debate on whether one is better than the other, more so on why are we even comparing them in the first place? The mere fact that politicians often refer to the A Level as the ‘gold standard’ is telling as to what they genuinely think of vocational qualifications, often forgetting the power and ubiquity of their voice on a national scale. Any parent surveying the narrative would less likely refer to this article (or indeed any other vocational advocate) but may listen to something a minister for education might say on national television.Culturally though, we really need to drop this divide. It harms all of education, particularly the young who deserve a more nuanced approach and better and more accurate guidance as to their life options. The fact we separate and label the academic from the technical and vocational does nothing to prepare young people for a future that is far less binary than we would often like to believe.WE NEED TO CHANGE THEN?At the risk of Orwellian connotations, fix should be the new change. We are stuck in a cycle of reform predicated on a historical misrecognition of what vocational skills entail and a wider misunderstanding of how and where the academic, vocational and technical sit within the educational world. For those who have sat in both camps, there are measurable successes. Quick wins.Obvious correlations and perhaps more importantly, knowledge and experience of what does and doesn’t work stemming fro...

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